Archive for April, 2010

Please welcome Balourd as an author to the Nest. He’s volunteered to fill in and help post as my new job is going to take me away quite a bit on business trips.

I’m also looking for a few more posters if anyone is interested to bring other points of view to the table, I’m especially looking for a PVP poster if anyone has a lot of Balance PVP experience. Please contact me at sunfyre@owlkin.org.

I have been raiding moonkin since TBC, and luckily I had a raid leader friend. He was understanding of moonkins and the poor itemization we suffer from (especially in TBC, remember?), so I never had to struggle with Cloth being locked out from my gear choices.
Since WOTLK though, I have hopped around from guild to guild and pugged more and more. I find some leaders very allergic to Moonkins rolling on cloth loot. I find this issue annoying, as some of our BiS are cloth and most of the ICC leather is Resto itemized.
How do you guys feel about cloth ? Does your raid leader let you roll on-par with other casters ?

“We have increased the potency of the Strength of Wrynn and Hellscream’s Warsong buffs in Icecrown Citadel by an additional 5%. These buffs now increase total health, healing done and damage dealt by 15%. In addition, the number of attempts allotted for all final bosses on Heroic difficulty has been increased to 45.“

“The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards

10- and 25-player (normal difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.

10- and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.“

So basically you cannot do 10man and 25man on the same toon per week. They will share the same lockout, and they drop the same gear. There’s no longer a point to have 25man raids at all.

Apparently Lady Vashj has been busy while everyone has turned their focus to Northrend, and now the impending Cataclysm upon Azeroth. It appears the naga have turned Serpentshrine Cavern into a large chocolate producing factory. Who knows what’s next?!

…Anyways. I found this while I was standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods and I had to take a picture. “Vosges” brand is suspiciously close to “Vashj”

This is sure to make moonkin happy, as it’ll allow us more mana conservation during those random strings of non-Omen of Clarity proc’ing. Zarhym announced on the Twitter Developer Chat that haste would no longer cause the duration of channeled spells to shorten, but it would cause more ticks during the duration. This means that Hurricane will always be 10 seconds long, but it’ll pulse many more times in the 10 seconds.

If you’re a consistent reader, you may have noticed that I have been posting a little less the last week or two. I’ve taken a step back from raiding to give myself more focus on certain things in real life, and I’m preparing to switch careers. My new job will cause me to travel up to 100% of the time, so I will not be able to commit to a raiding schedule.

I do not plan on ending the blog, but I am looking for one or two people to join me in writing entries, as there may be times where I’ll be away from my computer for days at a time on business and not able to post. If you’re interested, please email me a sample submission to sunfyre@owlkin.org. A level of familiarity with WordPress would help as well.

During the 4/16 Twitter Developer Chat Chat, Zarhym released one of their “most exciting” changes to Cataclysm is a new Balance Talent called “Solar Beam”. It appears it will work like the sun beams in the Freya encounter.

“Some of the new Balance talents for druids, like Solar Beam, which works like Freya’s spell where it instantly silences a target and they have to move out of the beam to get rid of the debuff.”

Looks interesting for PVP, and perhaps for trash pack pulls in PvE, but I’m not seeing a big PvE bonus for this. But it might be a big boon for arena druids, allowing you to force healers out in the open and not LoS-ing behind a stupid box.

This is slightly off topic, but I figured I’d write a post about it since it’s been consuming most of my time recently.

I ended up purchasing a 32GB Wifi-only iPad this week, and I know a lot of people have criticized it as a “over-priced over-hyped e-Reader”, and the first thing I can say is it definately is way more then that. The web capabilities of it are of course awesome. It really does feel neat to be able to experience an entire webpage in your hands, and not just a mobile verison (or only part at a time because an iPhone/etc screen is so small). There’s already some pretty great apps out there, the iPad version of TweetDeck is pretty awesome, as well as the Netflix and ABC players, which allow you to watch any Insta-queue Netflix movie or ABC tv show. One thing Apple DID get right this time is the battery. I just finished watching a 2 hour movie and spent less then 10% of the battery life on it.

One thing, however, is that it is more then an iPhone, and really is a tablet. This being said, it does not charge on any non-Mac USB port. The reason for this is the power requirements, and the only computers so far to provide the “super-USB” voltage/wattage is the Macs, and even then it’s incredbily slow. It’s designed to be charged from the wall outlet, but it doesn’t take an incredible amount of time, and as I said, you can go all day without needing to charge it, so charging it over night isn’t a big deal.

I’ve already purchased a few books and read them through the iBooks app. I’ve heard some people complain about the back light being an issue, but i’ven ever had a problem. It auto-adjusts based on the ambient light in the room, and I’ve never had headaches from it. I’ve also watched a few movies on it’s screen, and I like it. The iPad fits great on the machines I use at the gym, so I end up watching a TV show or a movie when I work out.

The best thing that I’ve found so far is the combination with my Motorola Droid. This can be done with a lot of other phones as well. With a rooted Motorola Droid, I can activate it as a “Wifi Tether”. This basically turns it into a Wifi hotspot, and utilizes it’s 3G data connection. This allows me to use my iPad anywhere the Droid gets data service (and mind you the Verizon 3G data network is much more expansive then AT&T’s), without paying the $30/mo that AT&T wants to charge you to get 3G data directly on the iPad. This also saved me the $130 cost it’d require to purchase a Wifi/3G iPad, and since I’m using Wifi, the battery life is better. The only draw back is the Wifi-only iPad lacks GPS, but it’s WPS (Wifi Positioning System) is disturbingly accurate. For any turn by turn directions I use the free Navigation on the Droid anyways.

All in all, I’m really happy with it. I think my Mac Book is slightly jealous, as it decided to bite the dust a few days after I purchased the iPad. I think the video card melted the motherboard, as most Mac Book Pro’s tend to do. Thank god for the Apple Protection Plan.

Squawkbox

Latest on Mon, 08:16 am

Athosian: @Thravia - at 16.5k crit u can effectively stack mastery. But.. you must have the T16 4set in order to not loose out on procs.

Thravia: Hi Sunfyre.
According to all my calculations, and simulationcrafts, mastery is better than both haste and crit, and especially better than haste once you get past the GCD cap - so why are all balance druids going full on with crit/haste?
I am having trouble figuring out what is most effective, and I am currently creating a BiS list for 5.4, but I don't know if I should go with a mastery/haste build, or crit/haste.
Here is a chart of my stat weights, http://i.imgur.com/lQMfnFV.png (I am currently at 10300 haste, 16000 crit, and 547 item level)

Kogot: Hey! Just wanted to say thanks for having this page! I love it!

Sunfyre: Thravia: Not sure. I'm curious how this interacts with the nerf. If it's 8% on all targets, that'd be nice.

Sunfyre: Quiver: I'd stick with the lower BP until you can comfortably hit the higher one without sacrificing too much crit.

Thravia: Hi Sunfyre. Whats your thougths on the new T16 set bonus? It's been changed again.

Quiver: Hi Sunfyre!
I am low ilvl Boomkin (around 517). After getting the 1st haste breakpoint(5273) i started stacking as much crit as possible. If i squeeze my gear, i can get to the 2nd haste breakpoint (10296); now, my question is: should i somewhat neglect crit and go for that 2nd haste plateau?
Thanks in advance!

Manax: Hello Sunfyre, do you think balance druids one of the worst dps classes in mop? I mean... look at worldoflogs, there are no balance druids in the top dps sections at no boss. Always WL, Mages or hunter that are good on ranged bosses. And AOE dps poor too, compared to other classes. What do you think?

Sunfyre: It depends if you have RPPM proc'd items. If you have two RPPM items (or just the legendary meta), you'll want to do the pre-Solar start (and you immediately proc CA once you hit Solar).

Nodotx: Sunfyre, is one channelling pulse towards Lunar still the ideal opener? i.e. Starfall > Wrath > Lunar Eclipse?
I saw this reply recently on a thread:
"I'm not sure why OP still says start fight pre-lunar, long time ago I switched to Solar eclipse.
I pre pot, starfall, (one dot), CA + INCA (or 3x treants), dotting (by this time most if not all procs are up- both dots AND treants enjoy it) and starifre\ss, starfall again.
when u leave CA u auto moving to lunar eclipse- which get u 3rd starfall.
with the old opner, Until u enter lunar, and starfire\ss to 0 energy and poping ca- most procs are pretty much over :P"